Love-in-a-Mist Page 8

  “Wild magic,” said Hal.

  Which by definition was never safe.

  Though not evil, either, for all the disquiet those accustomed to Schooled magic felt about it.

  “Please, Jemis,” said Mr. Dart.

  I bent down and picked up the box, which was surprisingly lightweight. Something inside shifted and made a strange noise, almost like a nicker. I flinched a little, having expected—if anything could be expected—something like a cat. But the noise inside was not of claws or padded feet, more like scrabbling hooves.

  Hooves? Had someone put a fawn in a box?

  I lifted the box as carefully as I could, and set it on top of the crates so I could climb up after it. This accomplished, I swung my leg over the topmost crate and sat there for a moment, looking down on my friends. The werelight had come up to hover over my shoulder, illuminating them both clearly.

  Mr. Dart was nearly dancing with eager impatience, like a child waiting for Winterturn morning. Hal’s expression was more calculating. With my teal coat slung over his arm he looked like a very superior attendant, perhaps the high priest of some ancient Astandalan ritual.

  I climbed down the stack, four crates to the ground, the box with its distressed occupant lowered down from crate to crate as I dropped down each. At the bottom I hesitated. Hal nodded at me gravely when I caught his eye.

  Something was going on here at a deeper level than I had any ability to understand. My passive sensitivity to magic caught the edge of great power moving, but to what end and with what purpose I didn’t know. It seemed utterly absurd that we had fallen into significance here; but it was obvious that we had.

  “Open it,” Mr. Dart said, his voice a bare whisper.

  I set the box down on the ground and knelt by it so I could work the straps out of their buckles. Whatever was inside had stopped scrabbling, but I could hear panting coming from it. The air coming from the holes smelled sweet, like the best hay mixed with ripe strawberries. I took another deep breath and felt unaccountably relieved, as if I stood once more in the Wood of Spiritual Refreshment.

  There was such eagerness to the air. It was filling with a resonance, so I could only think once more of that time Hal and I had spent the night on the roof of the campanile, woken by the morning bells shaking the world around us.

  The leather was stiff, but I worked it out of the buckles eventually. One strap, two. The silver sparkles were in the air again, silver and green and gold, as if all the dust had turned to jewels. The Magarran Strid had thundered around me at the Turning of the Waters, when a gorge emptied of its water and refilled again in a torrent, and I had not been so breathless as this.

  The last strap came free and flopped down. I licked dry lips, my heart thundering. The lid was snugly fitted, almost stuck. I worked at it with shaking hands. All I could think was, This is not for me.

  Not for me, but yet I was midwife to its happening. Inexplicably, tears were forming in my eyes, and my breath was catching, and the air was full of sparkles, like fireworks caught in the moment of expansion.

  With a last sharp tug, the lid finally came off. I rocked backwards, then set the lid down gently beside me as we all stared down into the box.

  Inside on a bed of thistledown was a unicorn foal.

  Chapter Eight

  The unicorn foal was tiny and perfect. It was perhaps the size of a cat, with a pearly white coat that had lavender tinting and a tiny nub of a horn the colour of the golden pearl I had been given in strange fashion by the cook of the Faculty of Magic at Tara. Its hooves were golden, too, and were, I noted somewhere in the distant back of my mind, single like a horse’s, not cloven like a deer’s.

  It was not otherwise that much like a horse, but clearly more like a horse than anything else. Its bones were delicate, its muzzle very slightly dished, and its mane and tail a shining silky white. But its eyes, oh, its eyes were a deep limpid black, like the Lady’s Pools over the mountains in the Coombe. It was looking up at Mr. Dart, who stared down at it with his lips parted and his own eyes blue as the sky.

  “That is not here for you,” Hal murmured.

  “No,” I replied, regretfully.

  The dragon had come for me, with riddles and violence and a strange treasure of honey and jade for my inheritance. I had answered its riddle, and slain it when it brought violence against my kin, and the world had closed back over its disruption like water over a falling stone. People were astonished by the dragon, by its existence and its slaying, but my reaction had been to offer the carcass to Morrowlea for the Scholars to study, and to learn what place in my community it had given me.

  This unicorn foal, unfolding delicate legs to stand unsteadily on those golden hooves, eyes still fixed on Mr. Dart’s face, was not for either Hal or I. Hal’s magic was part of Schooled wizardry, tamed and orderly. Mine was gone, but it had responded well enough to Hal’s teachings. Mr. Dart’s, however, was a wild magic in every sense of the word.

  “He will be the Lady’s heir,” Hal murmured very softly.

  That made me snap my head away from the unicorn. “What?”

  He started and lifted his hand to his mouth. “Don’t repeat that!”

  “Hal,” I whispered, more urgently.

  “We will talk of it later,” he said firmly. “Listen, we need to get him upstairs and away from here—who knows who will show up next? Think!”

  I resented that, rather, but I obeyed. Mr. Dart had reached out his good hand for the unicorn to sniff; it responded by licking his palm with a pink tongue. He smiled at it foolishly. “Is it that way, then?” he asked out loud, and reached down to lift it out of the box that had held it. It squirmed in his grasp until it was resting its chin on his breast, its nubbin of a horn angled towards his chin. He rubbed his thumb down its nose.

  “Oh, Jemis,” he said, looking up at me, eyes brilliant.

  “Come, Mr. Dart,” I said quietly, taking him by the elbow and turning him back into the maze.

  It struck me as peculiarly apposite that his given name should be Peregrine, after the Lady’s knight who had saved the unicorn that was ever after the symbol of Alinor.

  We tucked Mr. Dart back into his room, where the fireplace still overflowed with burning silver sparks, and left him to bond with the unicorn foal while Hal and I retreated into the hall to look at each other.

  “So,” I said.

  “So,” replied Hal.

  We stared at each other. Our court costumes of earlier generations added to the surreality of the experience. Was it only the day before yesterday we had been captured in Orio City’s notorious palace-prison? Was it only yesterday I had died of wireweed overdose and the abnegation of my magic? Was it only this morning that I had woken after being returned to life by miracle?

  “Do you think,” I said slowly, “that it’s too early for a drink?”

  Hal let out an explosive breath. “By the Emperor, no.”

  “I can help you there,” a bright, mocking voice said, and we turned to find Anna coming out of a room further down the hall. “You gentlemen seem to have turned a corner out of the past—you aren’t ghosts haunting this house, are you?”

  “No, thanks to the Lady,” I said, sweeping her a bow of the kind we’d learned for the theatricals the term we’d worn such outfits. “Good afternoon, Anna!”

  She paused doubtfully, a few yards away. “Do I know you, sir?”

  I straightened, surprised, and made eye contact with Hope, who had just come out of the room behind her friend. She laughed, her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling with merriment. “Look again, Anna!”

  We closed the few yards remaining between us, and I had the dubious gratification of seeing Anna respond to me with a shock and horror hardly less than that of Jullanar Maebh this morning, and she had seen me dead the night before.

  I decided to ignore her reaction. It was probably due to the contretemps with Lark this spring, which had ended up with the stoning and my subsequent departure from Morrowlea convinced I had failed out at the end and lost all my friends except for Hal to boot.

  “Miss Stornaway,” I said, drawing Hal up beside me. “You recall Mr. Leaveringham, I imagine?”

  “It is a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Lingham,” Hope replied, curtseying properly. “Mr. Greenwing, Mr. Lingham, may I present Miss Garsom?”

  Hal and I both bowed, even as Anna—Miss Garsom—responded with an automatic curtsey. Her colour remained high, though I really wasn’t sure with what emotion.

  Anna was Charese, with dark curly hair and olive-toned skin. She wore a Charese-style day dress of a soft aquamarine colour that matched my dark teal all too well. It was a pity, I thought, glancing at Hal and Hope, who were regarding each other with shy sideways glances, that their outfits clashed so terribly. Mind you, Hal’s mustard-yellow-and-red would clash with almost everything.

  “I think,” said Anna, putting her hand on my arm, “that it is entirely time for a drink. Shall we go down?”

  “Please,” I said, though I wondered what reason she could have for it. “Would you guide us? We came unexpectedly on the house and are unfamiliar with its ways.”

  “My uncle is old-fashioned, albeit not perhaps to the extent of your clothing,” Anna agreed.

  “Our baggage is behind us,”—somewhere, anyway— “and our host kindly offered us the loan while ours was cleaned. We had an upset with our, er, carriage, and then were caught in the storm.”

  “It is a fearsome one,” Anna said, shuddering. She led me past the staircase we had taken earlier and around the corner of the building. “No, not down there. You may have noted that my uncle is a great collector.”

  “It is hard to miss.”

  She giggled and patted me on the arm. “You are a card, Jemis! Mr. Greenwing,
that is. Now, we go through here and down this stair—yes, that’s so.”

  She led us to the stair guarded by the fantastic suit of armour. It was not so beautiful as the one we’d come upstairs by, but not a servant’s back stair, either. At the bottom was a blessedly uncluttered short hallway with several doors along each side. The one at the end looked as if it might lead outside, given the heavy bar across it, and I made note of its location. Who knew what further trouble might arrive unexpectedly!

  “Hope and I are here with my brother and his friend.” Her voice soured at this reference to Henry Coates, whom she apparently liked as little as Mr. Dart did. “My cousin and his wife are here also. My uncle invited us for Winterturn.”

  “That will be nice—to have your family together,” I suggested, thinking of how much I was looking forward to the time spent with my father, and with the Darts—all the Darts—too.

  Anna, like Mr. Dart, was an orphan of the Fall, her parents lost travelling on their way to or from Astandalas the Golden. She frowned. “My uncle is devoted to the idea of family, more perhaps than the reality. He has retreated in confusion to the solitude of his chambers.”

  “Ah,” I said, adding this to the reputations for snobbishness and eccentricity I’d already been given.

  “We all gather in this wing—the dining room is to the left, there, and there is a billiards table in the library, there, and and a front parlour, here, which connects to the dining room as well. I’m afraid the back parlour isn’t usable at the moment—a problem with the chimney, I believe—but I hope you will not be offended with just the one.”

  “I’m sure we can make do,” I replied, not mentioning that I was currently residing in a flat above the bookstore where I worked. Although I suspected Hope would find it intriguing, Anna would not find that either amusing or appropriate.

  She opened the door onto a pleasantly appointed room. It was more cluttered than was to my taste, but with a relatively ordinary quantity of furnishings, nothing like the maze of objects in the main hall. The only concession to that desire to accumulate showed in layers of carpets on the floor and some coy stacks of books and boxes in the corners, which had been disguised as end tables by means of setting oil lanterns on trays atop them, and the prodigious quantity of paintings and other items hung on the walls.

  I surveyed the room cautiously. The air was heavy and warm, with a fire blazing hot in two fireplaces, one on each side wall. This seemed a very strange architectural feature when I realized there was a pass-through on each, and that there was a shared chimney and grate with the rooms next over. Wood was stacked in elaborately carved wooden holders next to each andiron, which were themselves in the shape of elongated gryphons.

  There were half a dozen seats of varying shapes, sizes, and periods, most from well before the Fall; Hal and my outfits matched tolerably well. They were mostly upholstered in dull gold and crimson velvets, faded but still elegant.

  The floor was soft underfoot due to layers of multicoloured carpets piled in rich profusion. I didn’t recognize any of their styles, which suggested they had been imported from somewhere from far away during Imperial times. They could have come from the non-Astandalan parts of Alinor or Zunidh or Voonra or even farther away for all I knew, even half-legendary Kaphyrn or Daun.

  The walls were covered in an old, faded damask fabric, wide stripes of a blurry floral pattern in two shades of pink, or at least what you could see of it between all the many, many paintings, etchings, and odd artefacts and weapons from a wide variety of cultures. Most of the portraits were not particularly good, but there was enough common features to suggest that the family had been much more extensive in the past.

  I eyed a collection of daggers—long, short, pointed, wavy-edged, with handles of wood or ivory or steel or leather—that went up between two very ancient and lovely tapestries depicting incidents in the tale of the Knight and the Unicorn. That … was a strange coincidence, if coincidence it was. It was hard to believe in coincidences after my sojourn in the afterlife, even if it had been clear, then, that our choices were free and consequential.

  The ceilings were high and plastered, and there were only two windows, on the far wall opposite the entry. These were hung with heavy curtains, already drawn against the storm, but the sleet or snow pellets rattling against the outside was quite audible. The curtains were a deep crimson, almost new, and by far the brightest colour in the room, drawing the eye like a splash of blood.

  There were three gentlemen in the room, if one could judge by their dress (and one usually can, of course). Two were about our age, the third at least a decade and a half older. They were all large men, bigger in every dimension than either Hal or Mr. Dart; our borrowed clothes had not come from any of them.

  This was additionally curious given the fact that both the young men wore coats of exaggerated tailoring, bright of waistcoat and black of coat and collars of the highest points. Mr. Dart would visually fit right in with their company. I would be willing to bet they also possessed driving coats of an excessive number of shoulder capes and horses that were flashier than their substance.

  No, that was unfair. It was quite possible they were better judges of horseflesh than haberdashery.

  All three had stood when we entered, no doubt expecting the ladies. On seeing Hal and me, the eldest set down a broadsheet, the second a book. The third and apparently youngest seemed to have been staring into a cup, for he set something down on a side table with a click, and all I could see before he shifted to look at us was a porcelain demitasse and saucer.

  “Good afternoon,” said the older man. He had a deep voice, rather attractive in its way, as was his person, which was comfortably ruddy and full-fleshed with excessive love of food and drink if I did not mistake my mark. He had a genial expression and a pleasant smile that did not quite reach his eyes.

  “Good afternoon,” I replied, inclining my head. A heavy gust of wind rattled the windowpanes behind him, but never mind that. We were warm and indoors, and despite the niggling disquiet I felt knowing the fate of Finoury’s Inn, all any of us could do was our best with what lot we were given.

  “My uncle was not expecting other visitors, I had thought,” the man said, with a faint frown. His eyes were on our fantastically inappropriate garments, though, so his confusion was not untoward.

  “We were caught out by the storm,” I explained yet again, “and our host in his kindness loaned us these garments while ours are being seen to. Our luggage was behind us.”

  “I see,” he replied, his expression lightening.

  “May we know your names?” the younger of the other two men asked. His voice was medium-toned in all respects, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, educated without being mellifluous.

  I looked at them. Unlike the brown-haired and pale (albeit rubicund) older man, these were both olive-skinned and dark-haired. The speaker looked enough like Anna to be her brother, with the same aquiline nose, thick dark brows, and slight pinch to the lips. He had wide shoulders and a thick neck, and legs like tree trunks; though he was only a few inches taller than I he probably weighed nearly twice as much. A pugilist, I guessed, from the musculature.

  His friend, presumably Henry Coates of ill repute, was more massive yet. He was not quite so big as the Honourable Rag back home in Ragnor Bella, who was six feet tall and nearly as wide, but Mr. Coates could hardly be lacking more than six inches in either direction.

  I eyed the distribution of his muscles the way Dominus Lukel, the fencing master at Morrowlea, had taught me. Pugilism again, and my guess was that he’d consider himself a crack hand with the whip as well. A high-perch phaeton would be his vehicle of choice, I reckoned, and paid out of someone else’s money if Mr. Dart’s dislike was well-founded.

  (It struck me as quite likely that someone whose magic called forth a unicorn foal, of all things, was probably to be trusted when it came to judgments of character. Not that I hadn’t long since thought highly of Mr. Dart’s judgment in any case.)